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The nature of integration and disintegrations calls for
scrutiny. Are they different from the motions above mentioned,
from coming-to-be and passing-away, from growth and decay, from
change of place and from alteration? or must they be referred to
these? or, again, must some of these be regarded as types of
integration and disintegration?
If integration implies that one element proceeds towards another,
implies in short an approach, and disintegration, on the other
hand, a retreat into the background, such motions may be termed
local; we have clearly a case of two things moving in the
direction of unity, or else making away from each other.
If however the things achieve a sort of fusion, mixture,
blending, and if a unity comes into being, not when the process
of combination is already complete, but in the very act of
combining, to which of our specified motions shall we refer this
type? There will certainly be locomotion at first, but it will be
succeeded by something different; just as in growth locomotion is
found at the outset, though later it is supplanted by
quantitative motion. The present case is similar: locomotion
leads the way, but integration or disintegration does not
inevitably follow; integration takes place only when the
impinging elements become intertwined, disintegration only when
they are rent asunder by the contact.
On the other hand, it often happens that locomotion follows
disintegration, or else occurs simultaneously, though the
experience of the disintegrated is not conceived in terms of
locomotion: so too in integration a distinct experience, a
distinct unification, accompanies the locomotion and remains
separate from it.
Are we then to posit a new species for these two motions, adding
to them, perhaps, alteration? A thing is altered by becoming
dense- in other words, by integration; it is altered again by
being rarefied- that is, by disintegration. When wine and water
are mixed, something is produced different from either of the
pre-existing elements: thus, integration takes place, resulting
in alteration.
But perhaps we should recall a previous distinction, and while
holding that integrations and disintegrations precede
alterations, should maintain that alterations are nonetheless
distinct from either; that, further, not every alteration is of
this type [presupposing, that is to say, integration or
disintegration], and, in particular, rarefication and
condensation are not identical with disintegration and
integration, nor in any sense derived from them: to suppose that
they were would involve the admission of a vacuum.
Again, can we use integration and disintegration to explain
blackness and whiteness? But to doubt the independent existence
of these qualities means that, beginning with colours, we may end
by annihilating almost all qualities, or rather all without
exception; for if we identify every alteration, or qualitative
change, with integration and disintegration, we allow nothing
whatever to come into existence; the same elements persist,
nearer or farther apart.
Finally, how is it possible to class learning and being taught as
integrations?
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